Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
When it comes to environmental issues, no single actor is completely to blame, and that means no single actor can make the necessary changes to prevent catastrophic climate change. This means we can't put all the weight on governments to take actions to change the course of our climate future, and we can't blame individual … Continue reading Incentives for Environmentally Responsible Markets
In their book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write, "Libertarian paternalists see countless opportunities for improving people's health. Social influences could obviously be enlisted: if most people think that most people are starting to avoid unhealthy foods, or to exercise, more people will avoid unhealthy foods and will exercise." The book was published in … Continue reading Can We Employ Simple Health Nudges?
Society is held together by many unspoken rules of fairness, and maintaining rules of fairness is messy but rewarding work. We don't just advocate for fairness in our own lives, but will go out of our way to call out unfairness when we see it hampering the lives of others. We will protest, march in … Continue reading Maintaining the Rules of Fairness with Signaling and Altruistic Punishment
"Outcomes that are better than the reference points are gains. Below the reference point they are losses." Daniel Kahneman writes extensively about our subjective experiences of the world in his book Thinking Fast and Slow and about how those subjective experiences can have very serious consequences in our decisions, political stances, and beliefs about … Continue reading Subjective Gains and Losses
In my previous post I wrote about wasteful competition that occurs between animals within the same species, including us humans. To try to be impressive, we do a lot of things that are relatively wasteful. We might spend hours and hours focusing on developing a single skill, some animals will spend lots of time building … Continue reading Norms and Productive Coordination
The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson suggests that our self-interest drives a lot more of our behavior than we would like to admit. No matter what we are doing or what we are up to, part of our brain is active in looking at how we can maximize the world … Continue reading The Price of Friendship
I have written in the past about the idea and model that our brains act as press secretaries, taking the information that comes into the mind and presenting it in a way that makes everything happening in the mind look as good as it possibly can. This idea comes back in Robin Hanson and Kevin … Continue reading Press Secretaries
What inputs drive what types of behaviors in humans? This is a question I think about at an incredibly basic level all the time, but that I don't really hear much insightful discussion about in general. We all like to believe we (and everyone else) is in complete conscious control of our thoughts, minds, and … Continue reading How to Describe a Norm
Ryan Holiday's book Ego is the Enemy helped me to better understand and recognize moments when I was allowing my ego to drive my behaviors and decision making. So much of our desires and motivations we hide from ourselves in an attempt to make ourselves feel better about who we are and what we do. … Continue reading Performances on Social Media
In my last post, I described the ways in which much of our life happens on auto-pilot in habitual decisions and actions that often don’t register with our conscious mind. Not everything we do needs to be a conscious action (think about how tired your brain would become if you had to focus on every … Continue reading Building Habits